Thank you to everyone who has their preorders in for the new MOAT album Poison Stream as well as whatever else you have picked from the menu. It seems that with Indiegogo each thing you pick has to be ordered separately, who knows why? I’d like the nut loaf, the carrots and the new potatoes please, why can’t I have them on the same plate? That’s why we have made it so you can order the vinyl and CD together if you want them both, plus at a discount price. We could try and put other things together too but which things? We’re happy to see some people picking the mystery box. If you pick the mystery box, Olivia will send you a mail to discuss, we don’t want to send you something you already have. We’ve had a couple of positive reviews for Acid Rain here. The campaign is one day old and it’s been a good start, thank you. We have a few weeks to go finishing on Olivia’s birthday (December 5th).

It’s so exciting having a new record available and I really appreciate the support in purchasing it so we can continue to make these records into the future, at the moment they are queueing up but we have to sell them to continue to make them. Space Summit and the Jerome Froese project are coming next and then we’ll see with a new Noctorum album started, Ahad’s album near completion, Tony’s EP in Sydney. Don’t worry, they won’t all be in the same week or even the same kind of music (Salim), you can pick and choose over a period of time.

We were in the studio today with Ahad’s project, I was in and out, Dare was doing a couple of rough mixes to send to a piano player and generally listening through the tracks to get a sense of what more they might need. Mainly backing vocals are missing which Dare and I will do, but also cello, trumpet and piano before the mix will start. The process of making a record is quite a journey and in Ahad’s case even more so when you think that it all started with his brother booking him a sesh with me and us meeting in Starbucks in New York on December 4th 2017. From there to here and soon to have a finished album produced by Dare and I with me playing all the guitars and bass, Eddie on drums, what a trip.

I bought the November Mojo and Uncut magazines yesterday, they’re so expensive, £5.85 each but you do get an interesting CD and an amazingly deep analysis in the articles. I also bought the last issue of Shindig for £5.99. It would be way cheaper to get a subscription. In fact, In Deep Music Archive supporter Andy Collison bought us a year’s subscription to PROG magazine, one less for the overall bill (Thank You, Andy). I like to buy these magazines although I don’t read them thoroughly because there’s only so many hours in a day, but they often have interesting articles and it’s good to see what records are being released. We can be happy that albums are reviewed but you can only rely on your own taste and you only have to look at Pitchfork as a modern review site or Robert Christgau as an old review institution to know that you can’t take what they say seriously especially in retrospect. The NME used to do a great job of destroying people but not always a great job of objectivity. The problem for them was having a Go Betweens fan review AC/DC, they didn’t think that might be a problem because the excoriating music they didn’t like and hyping to the heavens the thing they did like was their modus operandi.

In my own experience, all you can do is not get carried away when you get a great review and don’t commit suicide when you get a bad one. Luckily these days the people who don’t like you tend to leave you alone and concentrate on their own thing which makes much more sense. Mojo cover – Queen, Shindig – CSNY, Uncut – PJ Harvey and Q and all the Metal magazines, the DJ magazines and all the other genres will all have their own heroes, what could be wrong with that?

I always wonder about art and time, politics and time. It seems to me that there should be more time to listen to an interview, or a band. There should be more time to listen to anyone. For example, every time a politician is interviewed it’s over in a minute. If it’s in-depth it’s over in half an hour. Why should things have an end, why can’t interviews be open-ended and why don’t the politicians want more time, why don’t the interviewers want more time, why don’t the public want more time? The length should be based on either running out of things to say or fatigue. Why not?

Music today is continuing with the much-missed Eddie Van Halen. Yesterday the Song Of The Daze was Jump, the reason being was that it looked like such a happy time for Eddie and the lads in the band, smiling his way through the video and playing a killer solo. Today it’s Fair Warning (1981) and Diver Down (1982), still two albums away from Jump which was on their sixth album (1984). But today and looking back at the music that was on one of yesterday’s albums, Van Halen 1 (1978), one of the most groundbreaking and awe-inspiring tracks was Eruption – it’s another world of technique and remember this was recorded in 1977. Here’s a later version of this track with Sammy Hagar introducing him, it’s 13 minutes.

Song Of The Daze